Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/332

We came to Adeline Thurston's Room

feels just the same, but I'm sure I don't know why she should. She doesn't write the stories; but she says it is because she is in them. Perhaps that does give her a claim to the artistic temperament.

But I'm away ahead of my story again, which is one of my most serious literary faults. I will return to Maudie and the poems she and I read by the river bank.

Maudie thought all the poems were beautiful. Of course, she said, they were not as good as Keats—she raves over Keats—nor as good as one or two things Browning did—"Blue ran the flash across, violets were born," for instance. She is always quoting that. But she said Adeline Thurston was young, and if she lived a few years more would give some great songs to the world. She said it just that way. And she said they showed that Adeline was a deep student of life, like us, and "probed humanity's heart to its core." She took that about humanity's heart from a lecture we had last month. She said Adeline had said she might bring me to the river to look at her, from a distance, but we were not to speak or make a noise, as we might disturb some Thought. And Adeline said she might tell a few of the other girls, too, but to warn them not to disturb her or to address her too abruptly when they met her. She said a poem getting born in the heart was like a bird sitting on a tree, and that it was easily scared away.

Well, that was the beginning of it all. I will now describe what followed. Maudie told a few more girls, and then more and more, till pretty soon the whole school knew it, and no one talked of anything but Adeline and her poetry. Every evening at sunset she disappeared, and a little later all the girls would follow very quietly and look at her from a distance as she stood bathed in the sun's dying rays. I've said that before, but it's such a good thing I'm going to say it again. Adeline always had her head back and her arms out and her lips parted. I didn't go after the first time. Once was enough. But every one else did, and talked and talked and talked till I was dreadfully tired of it, especially as I was writing a story at the time, and they used to interrupt me, which they never did in the dear old days that are no more. Adeline's room was in a corner of the old wing, and its one window looked over the river and distant hills. None of the Sisters could see that window from the Cloister, and only two of the girls could, but these two said a light burned in Adeline's room